C.7. Bmap tracepoints

Block mapping is a task central to any file system. GFS2 uses a traditional bitmap-based system with two bits per block. The main purpose of the tracepoints in this subsystem is to allow monitoring of the time taken to allocate and map blocks.

The gfs2_bmap tracepoint is called twice for each bmap operation: once at the start to display the bmap request, and once at the end to display the result. This makes it easy to match the requests and results together and measure the time taken to map blocks in different parts of the file system, different file offsets, or even of different files. It is also possible to see what the average extent sizes being returned are in comparison to those being requested.

To keep track of allocated blocks, gfs2_block_alloc is called not only on allocations, but also on freeing of blocks. Since the allocations are all referenced according to the inode for which the block is intended, this can be used to track which physical blocks belong to which files in a live file system. This is particularly useful when combined with blktrace, which will show problematic I/O patterns that may then be referred back to the relevant inodes using the mapping gained by means of this tracepoint.